


After

by Decepticonsensual



Series: He Jests at Scars [8]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-14 00:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5722033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decepticonsensual/pseuds/Decepticonsensual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ironhide doesn't react to battle the way most Autobots do - and there aren't many people who understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After

**Author's Note:**

> From a request on Tumblr with the prompt "battle fatigue".

When the battle was over, Ironhide found an unoccupied patch of wall, and collapsed against it without ceremony.

He’d never bothered trying to explain it:  the abrupt and complete lightness that overtook him after a fight, when his tanks were running on vapours and his body was a wreck.  It was a kind of distant, fuzzy bliss, where the world seemed to drop away.  Ratchet would have clucked disapprovingly and herded him into the med bay to have his sensors checked; his subordinates would have looked at him in confusion (and then the younger, more impressionable ones would have started trying to ape his post-battle haze, in the same way that they copied Optimus’s helm design or started chewing cygars like Kup).  The calm after a battle, the digestion of it, was an individual thing, and few would have understood.

And the only officer he knew would get it, got it without being told.

Ironhide glanced up as the pleasant tang of fuel penetrated the easy fog around him, and saw a ration cube being held under his nose by a familiar hand.

He accepted in silence; accepted, too, when Optimus dropped down beside him, settling so that their shoulders brushed, and they refueled without speaking.  There were some occasions like this when Optimus would start to ramble, after a while - it could start with, “We lost so-and-so today,” (at least, until even the great father to his troops had given up on learning names), or it could begin, “Do you remember what those sweets were called, the ones you used to be able to get at the counter in an all-night engex seller’s, with the half-crystalised centres?”

But those were always the times when they’d lost.  Today, they’d won - and so Optimus kept him quiet company, and Ironhide rested his head on his friend’s shoulder and let the haze white out the world.


End file.
